This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
From a topology point of view, a LAN consists of inter-connected switches and hosts being connected to these switches.
Beside the typical application to interconnect physically separated network elements via LANs (e.g. network elements located in different offices within one building), LANs may also be used as equipment internal transmission technology to interconnect different equipment parts or modules, e.g. for telecommunication equipment such as e.g. base transceiver stations. Such telecommunications nodes then use an internal LAN for transporting control, management and user traffic.
In a conventional network element implementation, a general equipment structure of a telecommunication node may consist of a rack with slots, where the slots are interconnected via a backplane. In such a structure, control modules and interface modules may be plugged into the slots in as flexible way, and the actual number and type of plug-in modules in the rack depend on the particular application of the node. Usually there is one central module, possibly protected by a redundant central module, in charge of the housekeeping functions of the node as e.g. management interface, configuration, alarm monitoring etc. Sometimes traffic functions as e.g. switching are also located on the central module. For the proper functioning of such a node, it is essential that the central module knows the actual slot configuration, i.e. it must know which type of module is in which slot. Typically each slot has an identifier realized in hardware (e.g. coded in the backplane), which can be read by the plugged-in module, and the module can then report back its slot number and type to the central module.
Furthermore each module needs one or more unique protocol addresses for the node internal communication. The actual address type depends on the used protocol(s), e.g. Ethernet and IP are often used. Such addresses can be derived from the slot identifier (e.g. by a table look-up operation), and because the slot identifier is unique the addresses are guaranteed to be also unique within the network element.
When considering to implement communication nodes without racks and backplanes (e.g. by a modular network element design where the different modules are interconnected via cables), problems regarding identifying the topology occur, especially when modules are cascaded, so that a chain or tree of modules is connected to the central module.
Assigning unique addresses to the modules becomes another challenge, because similar modules in a chain or tree are typically programmed with the same default protocol addresses and identifiers.
Configuring those protocol addresses and identifiers manually is slow, error prone and requires a considerable effort.
Therefore it is an objective of the present invention to provide an automated, simple mechanism to solve the above outlined problems and shortcomings.
Similar type of problems can also occur when interconnecting different network elements via any LAN.